Story of Sufficia I: Revolutionary Times

By Aksel Karlsson

In this thought-provoking post-apocalyptic political thriller, a nation evolves from a Montana city state after a pandemic destroys the governments of the world. Aksel Karlsson navigates the perils of life after the Catastrophe when the world declined, helping to rebuild and bring back the scientific and economic development of America before th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Aug 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638377931

Aksel Karlsson

Beckett Nunmiller is a jack of all trades. He is a linguist who speaks Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and in college he is currently minoring in Arabic with a major in economics. From a young age Beckett has pondered philosophical questions, and has created his own world to escape from a difficult childhood. His inspiration to write this book was the complex lore of the world he built in his imagination to escape his day to day life in grade school.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Leaving Home

M

ason sits before me behind bars in a cell on Dolly Island in the middle of King Lake. His decrepit figure with his bloody face points toward me as I stand before him, short enough to where his sitting is like someone of normal stature standing in front of me.

It stinks like feces, rotting urine, and wet dog here. He rots alongside his son, who lies dead at Mason's feet, a bullet in his neck, and that was nobody's fault but Mason's. For the past three days, I’ve intended to keep Mason in this cinder-block asylum below the surface of this grassy isle, with the only light to see that of the flickering LEDs from the corroding cement hallway I’ve been standing in from dusk till dawn for seventy-eight fun-filled hours.

Even if Mason could get his bloody shackled arms from his cold rusting metal chair, he is too weak from starvation to break through the wall of rebar that was purposely placed without a door just for him, because after what he had done to our people, he was never to leave the hundred-square-foot cement box again in his very short life after exile.

The entire country thinks he got a more humane execution. A photo of a decapitated body with his build was shot and posted on newspapers that went from all over the Republic of Sufficia printed and sold in all the major cities of our great nation.

Only a few know he is facing the fate he truly deserves. Such a despicable being! I kick his shins that are pressed against the rebar to wake him up and show him pictures of the people he had killed and buried—mass graves uncovered by soldiers of the Unificationist Liberation Army. He makes terrorized Ah! Uh! Oh! sounds as if he actually felt remorse. Maybe the fact that he is starving to death is getting to his head.

I recorded hours of his son being tortured before he finally gave up Mason's location when I interrogated him after his capture. James? Can you wake up? I need you to tell me where your father is! I say in a taunting voice as I inject his kneecap with adrenaline.

James wakes up and cries, "Ugh, I’m still here? I’m still here! No…no. I’m still here, and I shouldn’t be. Please, Aksel, we’ve been friends all our lives. Why are you doing this? I shake my body, smirking at Mason. I taunt James's voice as it plays on the loudspeaker: Why are you doing this…ooh!"

I chuckle and look at Mason with deep satisfaction in my exhausted, insane, homicidal face. Shaking the rebar violently, I scream in this scared old man's face: You couldn’t save him because he learned how to be an awful human being from you!

Moving back away from the hall, I flick a switch on the wall that shuts the speakers off. In a more anxious and insecure voice, I say, I learned how to be an awful human being from you. I flick the switch and leave the bunker prison.

As I walk up the scratched-up, chipped cement steps, Mason says, I’m sorry, Aksel! His cries are loud and audible. Sohahahorry! Uuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh! Ooohuhoo! Ah! Ah! Stop the tapes, please! I don’t deserve this! I only wanted you to be tough! I only wanted you to be strohononguh ahhhhh.

*  *  *

You’re probably thinking, What would propel a young man like myself to be so inhumane to a defenseless old man? That man isn’t innocent. What he did was so awful—I am only preparing him for hell if there is a hell. If his sins are forgiven in the next world, I am just making sure he sees justice in this world.

Now let me tell you a story that will properly explain to you what he is paying for; maybe you will see me in a different light.

*  *  *

First of all I got beaten a lot by Mason, to the point where my memory was affected. My earliest memory is of me in a strange house; he was raping my mother and pulling her hair, screaming at her as he violently banged her head against the wall, pressing himself against her behind as she lay chest down on the bed.

I think I was nine when that happened. I was living at that house at the time; it was by Willow Lake, farther east of the city. I’ve had many dreams about it ever since, often waking up in the middle of the night in my room in the palace. Mom was going to tell Mason's wife that they had a child together, and that is why he killed her. I don’t remember them arguing in my dreams, but Mason insisted that they had an argument and he was just drunk.

Serving as a reminder for how abusive he was to my mother the night she was murdered, I remember being thirteen years old when Mason beat James's mom to death after a series of many abusive episodes. I was going into Mason's master bedroom on the third floor of the immaculate palace. The glass to the door of the balcony was shattered, and guess who was naked and crying on the black-painted hardwood balcony freezing in the snow in the fetal position?

James, who was already this five-foot-five growing fourteen-year-old, was sitting on the bloody white-sheeted bed laughing and holding his stomach as he hysterically screamed, Ha ha! Mommy is getting her ass handed to her by Daddy! What a wimp! He rolled onto the fuzzy bear-carpet floor and laughed as hard as he could. Mason stomped his massive boot onto his wife's tiny left foot and proceeded to roundhouse kick her already-bloody face.

Her face was once so beautiful and white as snow, hair blond as gold. In this moment she was a redhead from all the blood with both eyes swollen shut. Her entire face was black and purple; the only white you could see was the ooze of Mason's seed.

I was in total shock watching this; I didn’t know what to do. I reverted back to the time I was frozen with shock when this happened to my mother. I knew my mom was about to die. I was only two feet tall, and there was nothing I could do about it. I felt just as helpless as a growing thirteen-year-old as I did when my mother died. What was I to do?

James went up to Mason after pulling in his laughter and said, Daddy? Can I get in on you and Mommy's playtime? As Mason was propping his wife's near-lifeless body up against the edge of the balcony, he told him he had thirty seconds to get as many hits to her large pregnant belly as he could. Mason held her over the balcony wall by her neck, pushing her to the wall with his leg as James punched her a couple times and proceeded to fall back on the floor laughing again.

I couldn’t watch any more of it; I went to my room to collect myself. I felt trapped, like there was nothing but despair in life. He wasn’t just going to beat his wife to death; when he was done, I knew I was next. This made me so sad, that he was just going to get away with this because he was such a powerful man physically and politically.

I cried as I knelt beside my bed, pushing my face against it. That was the most traumatizing moment in my life because I was more cognizant of it. When my own mother was being raped and had her neck snapped by Mason, I didn’t even remember her face. When I was growing up, I didn’t remember how my mother felt, how she sang, how she baked my favorite sweet bread. The entire reason I remember none of it is because the only memory of my mother is the day that she died.

Bellesi Paprocki was a sweet lady who used to sing me songs when I’d have the night horrors. She’d comfort me when I was sad, cook my favorite meals, and laugh with me. It saddened me that my only friend was so abused up until her death.

Suddenly I felt her presence, and I stopped crying as I sit on my knees, as if she were hugging me with her soul. Something inside me told me to run. I felt her energy; maybe she died, and she came by to tell me to leave with her so that the torment could end.

I gathered a bag full of food and left through the window of the parlor. Cloaking myself in a white blanket, I crawled in the foot-thick snow so the palace guards didn’t see me making my way toward the frozen Willow Lake. I slid down the hill and to the ice of the lake, where I finally stood up after crawling for half a mile.

Looking across the lake toward the many tree-filled islands of this swampy lake, I walked toward the part where the Otter River drained into the lake. My body was frozen to the bone by the time I reached the mouth of the river, where there was a cabin. I didn’t make it off the ice by the time I fell over from hypothermia. My shivering young body began turning a purplish blue.

When I woke up, I was in the grand living room beside the multicolored stone fireplace with the fire rushing beside me. I was covered in blankets on the couch that was moved closer so that I may receive the heat. Mason sat in a fancily carved wooden chair with his hands put together by his lips and a worried expression on his face. As he saw I finally opened my eyes, he said, Thank all that is good! I was worried sick you were about to die.

On his lap there was a silver tray with a tea set on it. He proceeded to pour some tea from the silver kettle into a cup and handed it to me with both hands. His long arms reached easily to me from where he was sitting. Son! Have some tea; it's stinging nettle. Everything will be OK. Please tell me what is wrong that you felt the need to leave. What can I do for you?

Chills coursed through my spine. Did he really not know what was wrong? Those chills turned into frustration as I passive-aggressively said, I don’t feel I belong here. You treat me so differently from James. Do I not matter to you?

Mason put his head back a bit. Squinting his blue eyes, he said, "Son, let me tell you a story. Before the catastrophes, I was growing up in a family of five, the oldest child. I never grew up in the manner you’d think a child should; all the attention and adoration went to my siblings, who were constantly being plopped out by my parents. At school, I hoped to find some attention. Never had I had any good attention. Any attention I got at school was just harassment from bullies who picked on me because I was weak. Girls used to make fun of me because of rumors that the alpha males would spread. They called me a psychopath because I grew my hair long. My parents always picked out dorky clothes so I wasn’t deemed presentable.

"All that has ever happened to me prior to this life is a bunch of abuse and neglect. My responsibilities were to take care of my more adored siblings because I was the oldest. You are special to me, Aksel, because I know you feel the same way: abused and neglected. You feel like this is unfair now, but you will be